


counterfeit soul

by unenthusiasticcavalry



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Blood, Character Death, Character Study, F/F, Gun Violence, M/M, POV Second Person, brain empty just thoughts about cowboy man, f-bombs are being had just as a warning, most people are mentioned but really this is about kepler and lovelace, s3 kepler is still a monster, the minilace is just some mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24729373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unenthusiasticcavalry/pseuds/unenthusiasticcavalry
Summary: She spit the truth of your fractured existence back at you with a venom that stripped your carefully crafted mask of it’s paint. She cracked jokes and she made friends and she thought for herself and she fought for her people and she seemed like she was human. The best part was that she didn’t even know what she was.
Relationships: Daniel Jacobi/Warren Kepler, Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski, Warren Kepler & Isabel Lovelace
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	counterfeit soul

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WOLF SEASON 3 AHEAD
> 
> (cw death, gun violence, blood, dehumanizing language)

You were never good at being a person. Maybe it was because you had never really tried. You were good at everything you tried as a rule. Top of the class, big fish in a small pond, whatever you wanted to call it, you were the best. Something you couldn’t be the best at was not worth doing. That’s what your father had told you, anyways, and you had believed him. It might have been the only thing that came out of his mouth that you had ever believed.

Sometimes you wondered if that was why you had never tried being a good person. You already knew you couldn’t excel at it, your shows of personhood being more of a cloak to hide the dagger of your true intentions than they were any attempt at authenticity. So why bother trying?

Being a monster paid well, anyways. Not that pay had really mattered, so long as your current gig let you run with the big dogs, those people you considered to be interesting. In your time, you found that the only people that you were worth your time fell into one of two categories:

  1. The people who were like you. The ones who would wring the humanity out of their bones if it meant they could change the world to their liking. The ones who’s eyes glinted when they met yours, seeing the predator that lurked behind your charms just as easily as you saw the same thing in theirs. The ones who wielded charisma and power just the same as they would a loaded gun. 
  2. The people who you could _change_ to be like you. The ones who’s potential would leap off the page of a classified briefing file before you could even locate them for recruitment. The ones with a past that you’d love to sink your claws into, with insecurities you’d feast on, who only needed a slight push from monstrous hands to become a beast of their own. The ones who’s buttons, if pressed _just right_ , would wring the humanity out of their own bones at your order, sucking the marrow dry with a _sir, yes, sir._



The rest of the world had their uses, of course. They could be entertaining, or they could be useful pawns, or both. Either way, you had gotten very comfortable with your three categories of people. So much so that, when you were bored, you’d size someone up in a bar, telling them quick lies and tall tales until you’d settled on just where they fell in your books. 

Mostly, they weren’t worth your time. But, they were entertaining, so you’d make a meal out of figuring out the function of every little cog in their head and heart and soul as they drank themselves into a stupor. And when you had finished your meal, you’d down the rest of your whiskey, wipe your mouth clean of the blood they hadn’t even noticed you take, and politely excuse yourself for the evening. 

That had been the easy part, the fun part. The hard part had been sitting alone in the quiet of your apartment afterwards, where the ghostly whispers of whatever kind of a person was left inside of you told you one thing: that it was a sad existence when you had to pick apart another human being just to feel like you were anywhere close to being one yourself.

It had been a few years since you had indulged yourself in that habit though, and nights at your apartment had been considerably less lonely with your firecracker stopping in a few times a week. Unprofessional, maybe, but who the hell cares? It was a lovely little paradox the two of you had going on. Loving him made you feel like a person, but it was also the distraction you two shared from a job that demanded you not be one. It was a pantomime of the happy couples of the rest of the world. You two had more bombs and bullets and broken promises in your future than you had dreams of domestic bliss, and you both knew it. You found comfort in knowing that the only obligations in your partnership were ones that he had to you. You could give and you could take away, you could be kind or you could be cruel. You could do whatever you wanted to do to hide the shame you felt knowing that he was your soft spot now, a little fire of hope for ‘being better’ that had ignited in your chest. He didn’t know that you would light the sky on fire to watch the flames dance in his pretty eyes. You preferred to keep it that way. 

It helped that he fit neatly into the second category of people you considered to be worth your time. You did what you had to do to get your firecracker’s explosions under control. It had been easier to get him to hand the detonator to you when he could tell himself it was out of love. You weren’t sure just how much of a person had been left in him when you met, but there was no arguing with the fact that you had done your work nicely to make him into a monster that would ignite at your say-so. You had tried not to feel guilty as you watched him slowly break himself into a mangled, monstrous form that would fit into the neat boxes of your world. You fought the urge to light the sky on fire, lest he think that he was anything more than a meal to you. Lest he think that you could be something more than the mere ghost of a person inside the bullet casing of a man that you had become.

Becoming that man was necessary to do your job. You had made a career out of a distracting smile and a quick trigger finger, and a habit of compartmentalization was required to keep yourself in check. That was the price of loyalty to the grinning serpent who asked you to bleed for him, so long as you didn’t get any on his shoes. That was how much a new world was going to cost. He was buying an empire with counterfeit souls, yours included. Not that your soul had ever pretended to be worth much in the first place.

Your ego, on the other hand, was a much different story. It was worth everything to you. Whether it was byproduct of decades of manipulating how the world had perceived you in order to get the job done, or if it was just a desperate need to feel important so that those nasty feelings of loneliness and smallness wouldn’t distract you from the task at hand, you weren’t sure. You had no shortage of ways to feed it, though. You had forgotten what there was outside of your hardened corner of the world, and the people inside didn’t know enough to stop feeding your pride and give you a wake-up call. 

No, that had to come from somewhere else.

That had to come from the captain. That  _ thing _ . The not-captain. Your master at arms.

Whatever you wanted to call her. The point was, she got under your skin in all the worst ways. She smiled crookedly at the woman, who’s command you had taken in one fell swoop, with a genuity that made you feel sick. She reminded you of your sister, who you hadn’t spoken to in god knows how long. She was just like her: she condemned you for what you had become in the name of what you called necessity, and what she would have called sickness. She spit the truth of your fractured existence back at you with a venom that stripped your carefully crafted mask of it’s paint. She cracked jokes and she made friends and she thought for herself and she fought for her people and she seemed like she was human. The only good part was that she didn’t even know the hypocrisy of it all. 

She didn’t know what she was. You tried to imagine what she was lying to herself about, pretending not to notice to keep up the facade that she was the same woman who had left earth all those years ago. Maybe it was the blush in her cheeks that burned a little too hot. Maybe her eyes seemed just a little bit lighter than they were before. Maybe her fingernails didn’t grow longer anymore, or maybe the birthmark on her jaw didn’t used to be there. You liked that idea. You liked the thought that the one thing you had over her was that at least you knew what you were, and you were smart enough to hide it. At least your body was born on soil, and not pieced together inside the burning heart of a star. You were monster only in figuratives. She was alien down to her core, no matter how convincing of a synthesized soul they had made her.

You got a strange satisfaction from the fact that you were the only one on that godforsaken station that knew what she was. You knew what she didn’t, and you could shatter her whole perception of herself with a few carefully revealed truths. You could let it all slip, and watch all her friends turn on her. The lieutenant wouldn’t look at her like she was trying to hide love she clearly felt and should have been saving for her husband. The comms officer would regard her with the same suspicion he had been saving for you. That rat of a doctor would know that he really  _ was  _ the only survivor of that doomed mission; that he had inadvertently brought this station into the warpath of a weapon disguised as a friend. You could extinguish her artificial spark with the truth, make her realize that she was more of a threat to the people she loved than you could ever be. And Lord, that was so,  _ so  _ tempting. You wanted to eat her high horse whole just to show her how much of a monster you could really be.

You ignored the part of yourself that told you that that was the kind of thing a man deeply insecure about his own character would want. It always came back to that for you: picking apart another person to feel like one yourself. A need for a controlled demolition that revelled in the careful destruction of all that dared oppose you. You could eliminate the dangerous variables, cut everything and everyone down to the necessities. You could cut the cancers out of everything around you with a word or a bullet. 

That’s why it wasn’t fair that you could never tear the tumorous insecurities from your own flesh, only bury them deeper under muscle and scar tissue until the only person that could find them was you. You should have been able to burn them out of you. You shouldn’t have felt bad about your lack of humanity after this long. You should have been okay with being a monster, because it was all you had ever known. But you weren’t. 

You weren’t okay with being a part of the vicious cycle, the revolving door of counterfeit souls that had turned you into a monster, and had made you turn your people into monsters afterwards. You weren’t okay with looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing empty eyes staring back at you. You weren’t okay with fearing that your sister had been right. You didn’t want to know that you couldn’t love anyone in a way that didn’t eat them alive. But no one could ever know. You couldn’t be delicate, you couldn’t be vulnerable. You had been like this for so long. You had never tried to be a good person. You had only ever had monstrousness, and without that, who were you?

You didn’t know, and that was terrifying. It was that uncertainty inside of yourself that you had tried to choke and smother and kill before it could torture you any longer. All your attempts to kill it with your further descent into cruelty had failed. The feelings of emptiness and disgust only got stronger. 

It didn’t help that the list of what was expected of you continued to grow, as the serpent got closer to the day he’d planned to auction the world and everyone on it. You could only guess what his true intentions were, but you took your orders with a fox’s smile as usual and implemented them flawlessly.

Flawlessly. That was the expectation. That was what was expected of you  _ always _ . It was what you expected of the others that had enough brains to be on your side. Those that got in your way, well… 

“ _ At this point I cannot expect anything from you. That would be silly.” _

They couldn’t have just kept their mouths shut and done what was asked of them. They had to push you. They had to make their little war, and they were too stupid to realize that they were bound to lose.

Just stupid enough to walk into a trap.

Just stupid enough for the comms officer and that  _ thing _ to find themselves exactly where you wanted them.

_ “Ladies and gentlemen and all mutineers at sea... This is your last chance to end this peacefully.” _

If you wanted, this was your chance.

_ “Eeny... meeny... mi -” _

**“Fuck you.”**

That  _ thing _ spat. Adorable.

**“I'm not scared of you. I'm not intimidated by you.”**

She should be.

**“You know the only thing I feel when I look at you?”**

Pray tell.

**“Pity.”**

Wait.

What?

**“You are so... goddamn... pathetic. You know why?”**

Don’t.

**“Because you talk and talk and talk about everything that you're doing for humanity… and you haven't even realized.”**

She must be the stupidest goddamn thing in this system if she thought-

**“You're not human.”**

She didn’t know-

**“You lost - no, you sold - every piece of your humanity.”**

_ It  _ didn’t know a goddamn thing about you.

That’s what you wanted to believe. 

But you knew that wasn’t true.

Even with a gun to it’s head, it was tearing you down brick by brick, reading the chinks in your armour with cold eyes that no longer cared if they lived or died so long as the others it thought it held dear were safe.

You had never recalled being quite so fucking furious. Even if you didn’t show it.

You never showed it. You never let anyone get that satisfaction.

And you weren’t about to start now. 

It wouldn’t get that from you. The only thing it would get from you was a bullet.

You had already made up your mind before you started to count. You hadn’t built up your walls just to have this inhuman, half brain-dead weapon, this ticking time bomb, tell you who you were. And besides, you enjoyed setting examples. Kill this thing. Let its blood stain the face of the man beside her, with a red that won’t ever quite come out, no matter how hard he scrubs. Let the woman on the comms panel cry for the thing she thinks is a woman she’s in love with. Take what is  _ yours _ . Keep what is  _ yours _ .

Keep your station. Keep your secrets. Keep your control and your flaws and everything that keeps you from full-blown insanity. Keep your insecurities tight to your chest, monster. The only person you let hurt you is yourself.

_ Bang _ .

Mostly, keep the idea to yourself that killing that thing didn’t kill your insecurities. And try not to let the blood it spilled convince you that it ever  _ was _ a person. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> oh boy yeah so. this is just my interpretation of cowboy man and the way his humanity relates to that of lovelace's before he goes on the big character arc train in season four. hope you liked it!


End file.
